Paul Krugman wonders why the hell this is still the face of the GOP.
From the NYT.
The Great Divide
By Paul Krugman
Yesterday The Times published a highly informative chart laying out the positions of the presidential candidates on major issues. It was, I’d argue, a useful reality check for those who believe that the next president can somehow usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation.
For what the chart made clear was the extent to which Democrats and Republicans live in separate moral and intellectual universes.
On one side, the Democrats are all promising to get out of Iraq and offering strongly progressive policies on taxes, health care and the environment. That’s understandable: the public hates the war, and public opinion seems to be running in a progressive direction.
What seems harder to understand is what’s happening on the other side — the degree to which almost all the Republicans have chosen to align themselves closely with the unpopular policies of an unpopular president. And I’m not just talking about their continuing enthusiasm for the Iraq war. The G.O.P. candidates are equally supportive of Bush economic policies.
...
And things seem likely to get worse as the election approaches.
...however, except for Mike Huckabee — a peculiar case who’ll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention — the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why?
Because the G.O.P. is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.
...
Krugman knows better than this.
I mean, he gives a pretty good, family-newspaper answer -- but since he asked the question…
There are two years that hold the answer as to why so many Republicans are supporting this lying failure of a President and his criminal and criminally incompetent policies: 1998 and 2004.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was every single thing Republicans claim they want in a “bipartisan” Democrat:
1. Smart
2. Capable
3. A superb communicator
4. Fiscally disciplined
5. A surplus-maker
6. Willing to compromise on just about anything and – to the horror of his party’s most loyal supporters -- give away to the GOP win after win on NAFTA, GATT, Welfare Reform and a slew of other items on the GOP Lifetime Wish List.
7. Respected on the world stage.
And for his troubles the GOP didn’t simply hard fight him on the fair-and-square every fucking inch of the way. Oh no. Instead, their political and media Parti apparats crawled up his ass and ripped into his guts like Furies on a mean whiskey drunk.
Morning, noon and night.
Wartime or peacetime.
24/7/365.
Under the banners of DeLay, Gingrich, Limbaugh and Falwell, they rededicated themselves to Total Political War on everyone Left of Pat Buchanan, and redoubled their efforts to destroy!destroy!destroy! the other side.
At any cost.
Now to be clear, in the matter of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton handed his enemies a sword and thought he could clever his way out from under the blade. But let’s also be clear that Ms. Lewinsky – like the endless Whitewater fishing expedition, or Congressional hearings to comb through fucking Christmas card lists -- was never more than the available means at-hand to serve Conservative political ends that had been in forged long before Clinton got into the Oval Office.
Because to have a (D) in the White House – any (D), any time, for any reason – stands in the way of the Republican One Party Theocracy.
Based solely on his accomplishments as President – and Republican rhetoric about what a President should be and do -- if Clinton had simply had an (R) after his name instead of a (D), the GOP would be clearing space on Mount Rushmore for him.
But he didn’t, and for that reason and that reason alone he had to be annihilated.
At any cost.
And then these same people “elected” and then “re-elected” an Administration fronted by a mush-mouthed halfwit and powered by looters, liars, traitors, imbeciles, degenerates and Dominionists.
Why? And why, as Krugman asks, do these same people still scuttle along in lockstep with leaders and policies who have marched them right off of the cliff over and over again?
Because in the space of a generation, Conservatism has devolved from dodgy-but-defensible political philosophy to a Hobbsean, Lord of the Flies cult whose tenets no longer intersect reality at any point.
Whose cultists no longer bother to consult the world of cause and effect for validation of their views of Right and Wrong.
Who instead cower in a terrifying darkness of their own making and, by the light of the AM Hate Radio dial, measure success by their own, creepy doctrinal checklist.
This is a small example of how a Modern Conservative “thinks”:
Government destroyed? Check.
Everyone armed to the teeth? Check.
Neocon-approved hack put in charge? Check.
Every critical public service “privatized” to friendly contractors? Check.
Every vital national resource handed over to corporate overlords? Check.
Corporation-friendly tax structure installed? Check.
All of the above being true, Iraq must therefore be Wildly Successful.
QED.
And since Iraq is Wildly Successful, there cannot have been any looting.
There was no insurgency.
It was a cake walk.
A slam dunk.
Iraqis do not hate us.
There were no ethic tensions.
Everything will be great in six more months.
We’re turning the corner.
9/11…9/11…9/11.
And since Iraq is Wildly Successful, all who say otherwise must either hate ‘Murrica or be the stooges of those who hate ‘Murrica.
In the 1990s, these people reacted to four years of exactly the kind of cooperation and concession-granting they said they wanted by shrieking “Impeach the Mothefucker!” ever louder and louder and louder, because these people will never get past the atavistic hate and stupidity that decades of relentless wingnut propaganda with a Christopath chaser has burned into their skulls.
In the 2000s the same people looked at four years of hard evidence of incompetence and ruin and incipient fascism – of an Administration that had systematically eviscerated every canon of genuine Conservatism – and bellowed “More Please!” ever louder and louder and louder, because these people will never, ever, ever give up their dream of a tidy, White, Male, totalitarian Jesusland where the clock has been run back to a perfect, conformist 1951 that never was.
They are the mooching, lying Party Malfunctionaries that launch wars they have no intention of fighting in or paying for, and set standards for others that they themselves have no intention of meeting, and couldn’t if they spent the next thousand years trying to evolve opposable thumbs, respect for the Constitution and some detectable trace of a fucking conscience.
The endless "Get Out of Accountability Free" cards that Conservatives deal out to cover every one of the Bush Administration's atrocities is the final and irrefutable proof that they did never meant a single fucking syllable of all of those millions of fiery words of self-righteous rhetoric the expended during the Clinton Era.
That it was all lies. All theater for their fuckwad masses.
And through it all – all 15 years of it – these grotesque failures have coped with this overwhelming evidence of their own perfidy, hypocrisy and complicity in the ruin of this nation by smirking, lying and called the rest of the world deranged.
Whose idea of an action plan is to burn the world down to the stumps because…because… because…well...that’ll Show Those Damned Libruls!
And so, in the words of Steve Gilliard -- our immortal bard of Fighting Liberalism --
“It is time to stop looking for an accommodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?”
